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Bringing creativity into policy engagement
How can mosaic-making enable collaborative approaches to policy making? This partnership with Scientia Scriptia and the Wellcome Policy Lab took a creative approach to fostering dialogue.
8 January 2025
In 2023 UCL PP joined a consortium led by Scientia Scripta as part of a Wellcome Policy Lab funded project to test creative approaches to policy development. This was one of four projects to be funded under this pilot scheme which sought to explore whether adding creative approaches to policy engagement toolkits could help generate different types of policy insight and maximise our impact.
Mosaics for Policy Development uses collaborative mosaic-making to create an open, safe and inclusive environment where diverse voices can share their lived experiences, expertise and ideas. As an in-person, embodied technique, it helps people to be present and attentive as they handle mosaic pieces, responding to their texture, weight and shapes, history. This ‘yes, and’ approach, combined with inclusive facilitation technique, allows people to share half-formed ideas which others can build on.
Testing a new approach
To evaluate the role and impact of collaborative mosaic-making in policy development UCL Public Policy and Scientia Scripta collaborated with Manchester Metropolitan University, Policy Connect and UCL to test the approach through a series of workshop in different policy domains.
We took an agile, iterative approach to the collaborative mosaic-making method, with four distinct learning cycles between September and November 2023. Each cycle involved planning and delivering a workshop followed by rapid evaluation and iteration of the technique and supporting materials.
UCL Public Policy led the first of these workshops in Oct 2023, bringing together academics and policy professionals from local government to explore silos and barriers to collaboration between climate and health research and policy. You can find out more about the content and outcomes of our workshop here.
This was a limited pilot but we used mixed method evaluation of both our teams and participants through out to measure and evaluate the outcomes, and iteratively develop the approach. This included: pre and post workshop questionnaires; semi structured interviews; team journaling and team retrospectives.
The benefits of a creative approach
Overall, it appeared that mosaic making had something to add in the academic-policy engagement space. Participants felt that they were better listened to and able to contribute more to the discussion.
Our pilot showed that compared to other techniques, the approach generated different kind of policy insight. We found the method encouraged a focus on stakeholder relationships – how people could work better together and learn from each other and why this is important. It also made people reflect on their personal responsibility – not just looking at what needs to change in the wider system, but what they needed to do differently
What we learnt
The pilot also taught us a lot about the parts of the approach that didn’t work well and could be improved in future iterations.
These included considerations of group size and structure of the sessions to gain the most from applying the technique. Participants not only had to get to grips with a new technique and use it to generate ideas, but also switch to a more decisive mode, placing a large cognitive burden on attendees.
On reflection however, this approach can add value to developing early stage or exploratory policy engagement and discussion, and makes a useful addition to the broad set of academic-policy engagement tools.